Spare, but warm and quietly elegant, Fatted Calf Blues uses metaphor, simile, and imagery to leave a lasting impression on the reader.

In “Forgiveness,” an encounter with a hawk on a beach causes a suicidal man to reflect on forgiveness versus the weight of the stones in his pockets. In “New Glasgow Kiss,” an ex-con flies across the ocean in the hope of reconciling with his estranged daughter. In “The Bridge by Moonlight,” a woman mourns her dead son and struggles to understand the depth of her daughter-in-law’s grief.

Many of the stories in Fatted Calf Blues have appeared in literary journals including Front’N’Centre, the Windsor Review, The Dublin Quarterly, Filling Station, Pottersfield Portfolio and Grain Magazine.

Steven Mayoff was born and raised in Montreal, lived in Toronto for 17 years and has been writing full time in the bucolic splendour of western Prince Edward Island since 2001. His fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals across Canada and the U.S., as well as in Ireland, France and Algeria.

His story collection, Fatted Calf Blues, won a 2010 PEI Book Award, was short-listed for a 2010 Re-Lit Award and was a Top 5 Finalist for the 2011 CBC Cross-Country Bookshelf (Maritime division). It was praised in the Globe & Mail as showing “a strong imagination at work.”

He has collaborated on short radio plays for CBC and on a stage play, Bully, which was produced at the Theatre Centre in Toronto in 2001. He received a nomination for a Dora Mavor Moore Award as lyricist for the musical, SwingStep, which was staged at the Ford Centre in North York in 1999.

As a librettist he has written a rock musical, Dorian, with composer Ted Dykstra and a short chamber opera, Milk Bar, with composer Jim O’Leary, which was performed as a student production at Mount Allison University in 2014. He is currently working on a full-length opera, Sikutopia, with Greenlandic composer, Arnannguaq Gerstrøm.

He is also completing a poetry collection, Red Planet Postcards, to be published in 2016. Our Lady of Steerage is his first novel. His web site is www.stevenmayoff.ca

Steven Mayoff's profile page

• Winner, PEI Award for Fiction 2009-2010
• Short-listed, ReLit Award for Short Fiction

"These are not stories linked by plot or character or place, but rather by something deeper, something more difficult to see; something down there, germinating."

- The Malahat Review